Brussels, 27/02/2014 (Agence Europe) - On 26 February, the European Parliament adopted a report by Evzen Tosenovsky (ECR, Czech Republic), by 560 votes to 70, with 15 abstentions, on telecoms networks in Europe, thus backing the digital infrastructure arm of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) unveiled by the European Commission in October 2011, and approving the planned budget of a €1 billion to back pan-European digital programmes, the deployment of high-speed networks and online public services, such as public procurement, health information and open data. Some 15% of the budget will be spent on broadband, a third of which projects must achieve connection speeds of over 100 megabytes a second.
The European Commission welcomed the vote as an important contribution to the future competitiveness of the whole of the European economy. EU Digital Strategy Commissioner Neelie Kroes said: “Digital infrastructure matters for the whole economy. So today's vote is not just about telecoms and internet, it's about giving every sector what they need to compete or deliver public services. (…) We need to combine investments like the ones voted on today with new rules so that we build a truly connected continent. When we have seamless networks and services that everyone can use, that's when we'll know that Europe is ready to compete for decades to come in the global economy”. (IL)